In the plastic shop, often we want to bend acrylic and make all kinds of interesting shapes. But acrylic is very brittle. So how can we bend acrylic where we want to have everything bent on an angle like this? Come with me. We’re going to bend some acrylic with just simple heat. You can make crazy sculptures and brackets and all kinds of things with simple heat bending of acrylic plastic. First we need to get some acrylic. So a lot of times in the shop we have all kinds of scrap pieces of acrylic.

Here I have some scrap acrylic here. And before we use the heat bender, we want to go ahead and take off this plastic protective covering because this will stick onto the paper. So make sure that we take this off before we start heat bending. So we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to heat bend. This acrylic acrylic is really great because it’s nice and clear and can be bent into forms. But it’s very brittle. So if we don’t use heat it’s going to snap when we’re bending it. You can use lots of things to heat bend acrylic. You can use simple heat guns like this as well as plastic strips. A heat gun or a hairdryer is common enough in a household, and it’s pretty safe way to go ahead and bend acrylic.

Here I have my heat gun. I’m going to go ahead and turn this on to hot. As you can see here, this can bend pretty well. It doesn’t have the perfect straight bend, but we can use a jig to bend that. So that’s the basic way. Just to use a heat gun to make a simple bend in an acrylic sheet.

This time I’m going to go ahead and use the edge of the table to bend it at a straight or bend. So here we have our previous hand bent one. I’m going to turn on the heat and we’ll go ahead and see how that goes. Generally you’re going to want to use some sort of jig and even have something to clamp on both edges, because the plastic can get quite hot if you’re doing lots of different bends. I have both of the bends. You can see this first one. It has a gradual bend, but then the second one that we used, the edge of the table. You can be much more accurate, this is a basic way to bend acrylic. Hopefully you can bend in different shapes as well.